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Overview

Rob DiUbaldo is a litigator, advisor, and counselor to companies engaged in the insurance, reinsurance, consumer finance and mortgage, and financial services sectors.

He is co-leader of the firm’s Property & Casualty Insurance Practice, leads the group’s primary and excess casualty insurance practice, and is co-leader of the firm’s reinsurance division. He regularly counsels and represents domestic and international insurers and reinsurers on matters involving complex claims, coverage, regulatory, and commercial issues, and has litigated and arbitrated a wide variety of disputes in the P&C, life, and health space. He also has been involved in disputes involving third-party administrators, brokers, managing general agents and underwriters, asset managers, and insolvency proceedings, and advises (re)insurers on contract wording, transactional matters, and treaty/policy drafting, both first-party and third-party coverages.

Rob is also an active member of the firm’s Consumer Finance and Title Insurance industry groups, representing lenders, mortgage servicers, financial institutions, title insurers, and other entities in dispute resolution and counseling involving a wide array of issues.

Experience

Reinsurance Experience
Represents cedents, reinsurers, run-off vehicles, asset managers, and other entities in the (re)insurance sector in dispute resolution, coverage matters, regulatory and transactional issues, and other matters that require counsel and advice. He has litigated and arbitrated disputes involving a broad range of issues in the P&C and life and health sectors, as well as many specialty lines, such as financial and surety products.

Specific to the life reinsurance industry, Rob represents cedents and reinsurers in matters involving issues such as premium rate increases under YRT and other types of reinsurance treaties, recapture, actuarial and pricing issues, agent and broker misconduct, and administrative errors, as well as other situations involving reinsured products and customary or bespoke provisions in life reinsurance agreements.

He also counsels clients on the drafting of reinsurance contracts and commutation agreements, issues pertaining to (re)insurer insolvencies, and has assisted on transactions in the (re)insurance sector.

Acts as coverage counsel for, and litigates and arbitrates on behalf of, insurers in matters involving many different lines of business, including commercial general liability, D&O, E&O, representations and warranties insurance, professional liability, EPL, cyber, property, business interruption, life and health, lender-placed insurance products, workers’ compensation, pollution, marine, and energy. He has substantial experience, at both the primary and excess layer, with a host of traditional insurance coverage issues, including trigger, exhaustion, allocation, number of occurrences and aggregation, other insurance provisions, scope of coverage, additional insured rights, recoupment, consent to settle or voluntary payment provisions, follow form clauses, and claims-made and notice requirements, as well as with both standard and unique exclusions or endorsements used in the industry.

In the CGL context, he has represented and counseled insurers on many different types of claims, including clergy sexual abuse, construction defect, lead paint exposure, diacetyl exposure, other types of alleged bodily injury, asbestos toxic tort, third-party property damage, antitrust and statutory violations, environmental damage, product contamination, food borne illness, and pollution. His experience includes representing insurers in matters involving excess policy limit verdicts and settlements or in which bad faith is alleged.

He also assists insurers in the drafting of insurance policy wordings, both in the first- and third-party contexts, and has advised clients in this capacity on wording-related issues arising under property, CGL, E&O, financial lines, and other specialty coverages.

Mortgage-Related, Consumer Finance, Title Insurance and General Commercial Litigation and Dispute Resolution

Represented financial institutions, lenders, mortgage servicers, title insurers, and other entities in complex litigation, arbitration, and regulatory matters involving, among other things:

Provided coverage advice to title insurers and litigated title insurance coverage disputes on matters involving consent to settle provisions, late notice and reporting provisions, bad faith and anti-assignment provisions in the context of access-easement issues, the scope of a carrier’s duty to defend for covered and uncovered causes of action, and the applicability of certain exclusions, such as the “assumed or agreed to” exclusion.

Reinsurance-related issues pertaining to the duty of utmost good faith, follow-the-fortunes, the duty to disclose, the alleged breach of certain underwriting guidelines, and agent misconduct.

Certain reported decisions are listed below.

Representative Decisions and Engagements

Reinsurance

Rob represents, or has represented, some of the world’s leading insurance and reinsurance companies in matters involving hundreds of millions of dollars in claims arising from the P&C, life, and health sectors. Many of these cases arose in the context of confidential arbitration proceedings and thus are not reported. Recent matters include:

Represented (re)insurers in various arbitrations and pre-dispute matters involving a reinsurers’ or retrocessionaires’ ability to increase premium rates under YRT reinsurance treaties.

Represented asset manager and reinsurers in the negotiation and implementation of various types of reinsurance structures (traditional and collateralized) covering a multitude of underlying P&C risks.

Represented a life reinsurer in an arbitration involving the scope of a treaty’s contested claims provision, related clauses, and the duty of utmost good faith.

Represented a cedent in a life reinsurance dispute involving underlying regulatory settlements and related issues.

Represented a large global reinsurer in recovering a nine-figure damages award in a dispute concerning a host of property reinsurance coverages and the effect of subrogation, salvage, and inuring recovery provisions.

Represented numerous cedents and reinsurers in arbitrations involving a host of traditional reinsurance issues, including follow-the-fortunes and follow-the-settlements, allocation, aggregation and number of occurrences, notice and sunset provisions, and utmost good faith.

Star Ins. Co. v. Nat'l Union Fire Ins. Co. of Pittsburgh, No. 2:13-cv-13807 (E.D. Mich. 2013) (obtaining a modification of a preliminary injunction issued against an arbitrator involved in a reinsurance dispute and limiting the scope of the injunction with respect to the arbitrator).

Suter v. Gen. Accident Ins. Co. of Am., No. 2:01-cv-02686, 2006 WL 2000881 (D.N.J. July 17, 2006) (verdict in a bench trial for the reinsurer based on bad faith claims handling and the cession of claims that were outside the scope of the reinsured policy).

Cty. of Suffolk v. Lexington Ins. Co., No. 604661/2017 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2018) (obtaining summary judgment for second layer excess insurer in dispute involving E&O coverage provided by an excess liability policy, on grounds that the underlying claim did not involve a “wrongful act” implicating the policy’s insuring agreement, lacked the requisite fortuity required by New York law, and was barred by the policy’s breach of contract exclusion).

Pryor v. AGLIC, No. 1740/05 (N.J. Super. Ct. June 22, 2007) (motion to dismiss a claim against a professional liability insurer based on late notice and failure to comply with the provisions of a claim made and reported policy).

Consumer Finance & Title Insurance Defense

Saxon Mortg. Servs., Inc. v. Wright, No. 707856/2017 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. July 22, 2019) (granting lender’s motion for summary judgment to secure the cancellation and discharge of record of an erroneous satisfaction of mortgage, declaring the subject mortgages valid and subsisting liens on the subject premises, and striking answer interposed by borrower).

SMI Home Mortg. v. Solano, No. 0381270/2009 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2017) (obtaining judgment in favor of a mortgage servicer declaring an erroneous satisfaction of mortgage null and void, directing the city register to cancel and discharge said satisfaction of mortgage, and declaring that a CEMA/mortgages are valid and subsisting liens and encumbrances on the subject property).

SMI Home Mortg. v. Clemons, No. 503244/2015 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Mar. 29, 2016) (vacating an erroneous satisfaction of mortgage and obtaining a declaration that the consolidated mortgages at issue are valid and subsisting liens on the subject property).

"Intervention in Underlying Action for Special Jury Verdicts to Affect Allocation: Questions to Ask in the Underlying Case to Avoid Impairing Coverage Issues," ACI Insurance Allocation Conference, New York (June 2016).

Industries

Covenant House

Each year, Rob participates in the (Re)insurance Industry “Sleep Out”, a unique charity event that benefits the Covenant House, an organization dedicated to youth homelessness. During the Sleep Out, Rob spends a night at Covenant House, talking with homeless kids and learning how they're building new lives. At midnight, when the kids go to sleep in their beds, Rob and other professionals in the insurance and financial services industry head outside, to spend the night sleeping in cardboard boxes.

This year, Rob personally raised over $6,000 for the event, and the event as a whole raised over $380,000. Over the past 4 years, Rob has raised in excess of $25,000 through his participation in the Sleep Out event. Rob is also involved with Covenant House throughout the year, assisting with job readiness, training, and placement programs. The New York office of Carlton Fields has hosted Covenant House youth programs over the past two years, providing advice, mentoring and insight to the youth as they start their journey into the workforce or pursue their careers. For more information about the event, or to donate, visit www.sleepout.org.

Disclaimer

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